I love Wii

We got a Wii Fit board this week. It hurt my feelings by estimating my Wii age at 56 but I still love it because the Wii is just so good at looking after the people playing with it. You don't need any occult technological insight to make it work for you. There are big lessons here about doing the simple stuff very well indeed.

02 what shall I do?

I had wanted to email this picture in from my mobile phone. I've been trying to do it for about a week. A week before that it would have been no problem but for some reason - despite months of happily being able to email pictures from my phone - I needed to download something new from 02. When I downloaded it my old email phone settings were still not working.

Hopefully there is some kind of work around or new thing I can do. What really bugs me about it, is that there was no warning or explanation from 02. There did not seem to be any option to carry on as I had been.

I wonder sometimes, whether we give 'technology' companies more slack than other retailers in terms of what we will put up with. I have only just bought my excellent Bongo minibus/campervan thing, but if the person who sold it to me came and changed the way it worked in a couple of months without any explanation I would be furious. As it is I am gutted, because I have dinked it already. And of course, when I wanted to email a picture to my blog to blow off steam about it I couldn't...

Is this how things start these days?

I saw this in the Guardian Guide booklet, forgot about it, Googled it, found an article on Gawker and clicked through a link from there to get to this flickr set.

The idea orginally appeared in Village Voice as part of a witty satire on rap music. People have come up with their own take on it and flickr has been the seedbed for the result.

Songs expressed as graphs and functional diagrams. Funny and strangely satisfying to decode. It's like sharing an in-joke which is how I think music and poetry work, although across a broader span of emotions than humour. I do, I really think that.

Words, words words...

I finished transcribing an interview with Alan Moore last night. In about 30 minutes of chit chat he gave me more than 3000 words worth of useful commentary. I asked three questions. There are lots of reasons he is a writer and that is one of them.

The big four O

I'm 40 this year and, like any mature adult would, I'm thinking of presents I would like. A new saddle for my bike would be good because I keep slipping forwards on this one. Also I'd like something that takes better video than my phone or my camera and something that takes pictures without eating batteries. I want, I want - but if I don't write it down somewhere I'll forget. Hopefully I'll update this list with something that shows a bit of personality or ambition for experience but for now, I'm materialisticating.

Warwick Castle

Yesterday we went to Warwick Castle and saw this:




It's a trebuchet and I want one.

Black Hawk Down?

The Olympic torch runs the gamut of Tibet protesters as it proceeds through European capitals in much the same way US troops rolled through the hostile streets of Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down.

Phalanxes of state security officers from different nations guard a symbol of popular togetherness... from the people.

Contraband fell at the 11th

My horse in the Grand National sweep was attracting odds of 500 to 1. People said to me: "you should put a tenner on that" as though it made more sense than betting on a horse that was offering me 5-1. I did wonder. He fell at the 11th. Butter hooves.

The Lost Girls come home

Alan Moore is a big hairy Englishman who resolutely comes from my town and is determined never to come from anywhere else. Along with his charming artist missus Melinda Gebbie (neither large nor overtly hirstute) he spent years and years painstakingly crafting The Lost Girls, an erotic masterpiece in graphic novel form. Various legal shenanigans (its central characters are the adult counterparts to three of fiction's best known girl heroines) have delayed its availability in the UK. Now I am informed by a big, hairless (I'm exaggerating) American from Top Shelf publishing called Chris Staros, that this has all been sorted out. It is now safe to approach, purchase and read copies of this book in the United Kingdom, where it was written. Yay. Got it already.

Sword fights are not only for winners

The demise of the duel to the death as a means of settling disputes in western culture has led to an unrecognised phenomenon: the increasing number of people who lose sword fights and live to tell the tale. Here is the story of one of those people.

Bilbo

This song means so much more to me than I could ever have believed. Dedicating it to my son William Beauregarde.

The Fishmarket

It's been a long time since our town's Fishmarket smelled of fish. When the market closed down it was colonised by a bunch of creatives who turned it into an arts centre. They conjured resources from thin air when every public budget in the area was being slashed and have gradually, tenaciously, built it up into something attracting all kinds of attention.

Today it reopened after transforming its cafe from somewhere that looked like a student's living room to somewhere that looks like a place a student might go for a coffee. You never know what you are going to see there and when you think about it, how many places can you really say that about? It's brilliant. Highly magical, no doubt about it.

The office sweepstake

I have just picked a name out of the bag as my entry in the sweepstake for the Grand National on Saturday. Quids in, possible £20 back. Bit of fun isn't it? Cheers you up.
My horse is Contraband. I have seen odds of 500-1 for him to win the race. I understand that some people will be quietly impressed if he manages to start it. Great.